Watcher of the Dead

by J. V. Jones

  What if she couldn’t get rid of her lore either? What if it found a way back?

  Looking carefully at Lissit, Effie said, “Why was Gregor paddling east? Rime warned us never to head in that direction. The Sull border’s out there.”

  Lissit now had the mustard and ginger. She slid the block of lard from the counter, pressed it against her chest and walked toward the door. “I have to get these to Cook.”

  Effie blocked her. “What was Gregor doing?”

  Lissit moved to the side. So did Effie. Quite suddenly she knew she would hurt this girl.

  Even if she got hurt back.

  Perhaps Lissit saw it in her face or perhaps she was just getting anxious about being missed for she blurted out, “He was looking for the break. It’s in the east—he knew that much—by the border. He was trying to save everyone.” She pushed against Effie. The lard was melting through its cover, depositing a dark stain on her dress. “Including you and me.”

  Effie gave, allowing the girl to move past her. “He was trying to lift the curse?”

  Lissit opened the door and then swung around to face Effie. She was breathing hard. “It’s not a curse, you stupid girl. It’s a doom. The Endlords will walk Gray first.”

  Effie watched as Lissit fled.

  She felt as if she had been slapped. All she could do for a time was stand and absorb the blow. Stupid girl stung because it was right. Effie Sevrance was a stupid girl who didn’t know it—the worst kind. Everyone kept telling her there wasn’t a curse, but she hadn’t believed it. Gray was the Cursed Clan. She had thought that meant that people were dying because of a curse, like Maudelyn Dhoone’s unborn babies. But people were really dying because it was a marsh, just like Rime had said. Cuts got infected. People got sick. The marsh got inside their lungs.

  Like Chedd’s. It wasn’t a good place to raise a family—it was risky—and people left. Warriors took their families to Otler, HalfBludd and Hill. Then, when they were older, some came back. That was why there were so many oldtimers here—because your clan was always your clan.

  Finding she was free to move again, Effie searched the shelves for something to eat. Locating a wet box containing dairy products, she picked out a huge wheel of cheese and bit on it. That’ll cost them, she thought, putting it back.

  So, some people died because the marsh made them sick. And others, like Gregor, died because they were trying to prevent the doom. Lissit said he had gone east looking for what? The break?

  Magic to find it. Magic to block it.

  Effie recalled Bitty Shank telling her that he could still feel the two fingers he lost to the bite. He said they got cold and hot and tingly even though they weren’t there. That was how she felt about her lore right now. It tingled.

  Things were starting to make sense. Effie picked up the fallen apple from the floor, dusted it off and stuck it down her dress for later. Deep in thought, she left the buttery and took the fork in the corridor toward the guidehouse.

  The Grayhouse was cool and quiet. A faint mist stirred at her feet as she walked, and she was glad when the corridor gave way to stairs, glad to climb above waterlevel. As she approached the guidehouse door, she slowed, unsure whether to knock or enter unannounced. Then she recalled that Flora’s body had been brought here only a few hours earlier.

  No point in knocking for the dead.

  Raising the latch, she entered a room so thick with smoke she couldn’t tell its size or shape. The only thing she knew for certain was that the Gray guidestone was here. She could feel it pull along the small bones in her ear. Closing the door softly behind her, she waited for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness.

  Over the course of several minutes the Graystone emerged from the smoke. With a shock of wonder Effie saw that it wasn’t oblong like the Hailstone or other guidestones. The Graystone was round.

  And it looked as much metal as stone.

  It gleamed in the dull red light of the smokefires, a smoothly rounded lump of strangely sheared metals fused with scorched and flinty stone. How would you grind it, Effie wondered, without producing sparks?

  Because it didn’t seem as if she had any choice, she walked forward and touched it. For a brief instant she saw her hand reflected in the metal and then she saw through the guidestone to the place on the other side.

  Things immeasurably old and powerful waited. Effie didn’t have a word for them—gods would not do. They were more like storms, black and destructive, lit by metallic flashes of lightning. Only they were aware and they knew her and they turned their great thunderheads toward her, and Effie felt her bladder loosen and wetness streak down her legs. As she yanked back her hand, they followed her, cracking like thunder, bolting toward her, their clouds forming the shape of a . . .

  “Girl!”

  Effie switched. She was somewhere other and then she was back in the roundhouse, and her dress was wet and she was shaking and she thought she might just as well faint.

  “Sit.” A chair was thrust with perfect precision under her bottom and she dropped onto it. Luckily it had a back. Unluckily, someone yanked her and the chair round, sending its legs screeching over the stone and propelling Effie forward so that she had to stay alert and pay attention to prevent herself from careening to the floor.

  A face covered with mud and not at all friendly thrust itself in front of her eyes. “What the hell are you doing in my guidehouse?”

  Effie blinked. Spittle had landed on her mouth and eyelids. “Visiting?”

  The guide, for that’s who the face belonged to, thumped the back of the chair and stalked away. Effie just sat. She didn’t smell so good, she realized, and her skirt felt yucky.

  “Here.” The guide thrust something at her. “Take off your dress and put this on.”

  She hesitated.

  “Now. I will turn and I will not look. Your child’s body does not interest me.”

  Effie believed him. She was surprised by the effort it took to leave the chair, undress, and slip on the robe provided by the guide. The apple she had stowed in her bodice went flying. Its fate seemed to be to roll across the floor. The guide, who was indeed facing away from her, tracked it as it trundled past his feet.

  Unsure what to to with the discarded dress, Effie dropped it tactfully under the chair. She sat again. The robe was as heavy as a dog.

  “Are you dressed?”

  Effie nodded, realized the guide wouldn’t be able to see her so spoke instead. “Yes.”

  He turned and the smoke revolved with him. All guides were physically strong—they spent their days grinding stone—and Gray’s guide was no different. He looked ready for a brawl. “How did you get in?”

  “The corridor behind the kitchen.”

  “How long were you touching the stone?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What did you see?”

  Effie couldn’t understand why her eyes began to sting. Stupid eyes. Stupid sting.

  The guide moved closer. The dried mud on his face was cracked around his mouth. When he spoke he made a sentence of each word.

  “What. Did. You. See.”

  “Storms,” Effie said, aware she was sounding a bit hysterical but unable to control herself. “Things coming. Bad things.”

  “The Endlords?”

  Effie felt a prick of fear. There was that word again. “I don’t know.”

  The guide breathed heavily and deeply as if she had given him the worst possible answer. “Were they close?”

  She closed her eyes and saw them tearing through the guidestone. In a whisper she said, “They’re almost here.”

  Clan Gray’s guide put his hands over his face and rested. His bulk and his vitality appeared to shrink and when he removed his hand and spoke to her he was in some fundamental way a different man from the one who had challenged her by the stone.

  “Go,” he told her.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means we’ll be the first to fall.”

  “B
ut—”

  He looked at her with eyes that held terrible knowledge. “Do you think what you saw will stop at the border of Clan Gray?”

  She did not. She rose, picked up her dress.

  “Go the way you came,” he said as she made a move toward the front of the guidehouse. “We keep a three-day deathwatch on Flora Dunladen and you will not disturb her peace.”

  Effie looked into the smoke. Perhaps she saw a table with a dead girl upon it; she didn’t know.

  She turned and left the way she came. The guide watched her. In some sense she felt she deserted him.

  As soon as the door was closed she broke into a run. It was suddenly vital to her peace of mind to see Chedd. Chedd would know what to do. Chedd would calm her down, point out exactly where and how she was being silly. And they’d laugh about her peeing her dress—in front of the guidestone, no less. Couldn’t you be damned in the seventh circle of hell for that?

  She raced though the corridor and into the kitchen. Lissit was heading the fish and Effie made her wipe her hands and fetch a jug of hot water.

  “Put some mustard seeds in it,” Effie told her, making a last minute improvement to her sneaky get-in-to-see-Chedd plan. “And some of the ginger too.”

  Lissit didn’t look happy at this but she was accustomed to taking orders and did as she was told. Cook was busy cranking spitted muskrats above the hearth flames and paid no heed to Lissit grating ginger and cracking seeds.

  You couldn’t run with a jug of hot water, couldn’t even walk quickly, Effie found as she plodded through the Salamander Hall and up the stairs. Steam from the water coated her face. It smelled just about perfect. Medicinal, definitely medicinal.

  Luck stayed with her as she turned into her hallway. The guard outside Chedd’s door—which was really her door—had changed. Composing herself, she approached him.

  “The healer sent me to fetch this,” she said, holding up the jug. “Said I have to give it to him straightaway.”

  The guard didn’t look at the jug. He was gray-haired with hard belly fat and a soldier’s useful muscles and she knew straightaway she hadn’t fooled him. He wasn’t unkind, just firm. “Go away, girl. There’s sickness here and you don’t want any part of it.”

  She looked at him. “I need to see him.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “How is he?”

  “Healer’s in with him now.”

  “Let me wait.”

  He sucked in a thoughtful breath. “How old are you?”

  “Nearly ten.”

  For some reason this answer made him smile. “Set down the jug and go and sit against the wall.”

  Effie did as she was told. She was tired out and shivery and the guide’s robe itched the back of her neck. More than anything in the world she wanted to see Chedd.

  She waited. If she concentrated hard she could hear voices. It sounded as if Tull Buckler was in there too. She listened and listened but couldn’t hear Chedd. After a while she got thirsty and drank some of the water.

  Footsteps pounding toward the door made her start. Voices were suddenly louder. The latch was lifted and the door swept open. Effie made a run for it, aiming head first for the opening. She bowled right into Tull Buckler. The warrior pinned her by the shoulders as if she weighed next to nothing and then calmly moved her aside. His face was grim. He nodded to the guard, who took Effie by the arm and pulled her away from the door.

  The healer came out. Her expression filled Effie with fear, and Effie bucked against the guard, slamming and grasping, desperate to get free. “Let me see him,” she screamed. “Chedd! It’s me. Eff.”

  The healer pushed her lovely silver hair from her face. “Let her see him,” she said.

  Instantly Effie was free.

  Forever she would remember those seconds, the four seconds it took to get to Chedd’s bed. Four seconds when the world hadn’t collapsed and she was moving with purpose, not thinking, just moving, and possibilities still existed and as long as she didn’t arrive at her destination everything hung in the balance, undecided.

  She got into bed with him. He was still warm and he still felt like Chedd.

  Softly she said in his ear. “It’s me.” She told him she loved him and then waited patiently for his reply.

  CHAPTER 29

  An Uninvited Guest

  ANGUS LOK LEFT his room in the Crater, taking his very few possessions with him. He hadn’t yet decided whether or not he would return, but his policy was the same either way. Be ready.

  The room was acceptable to him in all essential ways. It was in a private lodging house, not an inn, located at the front of the building with a window looking down on the street. It had a bed, a washstand and a chamber pot, nothing else. Its landlord catered discreetly to men and women who were taking the Holy Cure; a middle-aged, hopeful, soft-bodied clientele with just enough money to finance a trip to the city for the required twenty-nine days of the cure. Angus could imagine the Phage looking for him in many, many places, but in a house filled with mildly religious, gout-ridden invalids stinking of sulfur he felt relatively safe.

  If they found him they would strike him down.

  You never left the Phage.

  You never killed the Phage.

  And you never interfered with their plans.

  That was three and counting. For a certainty they were on his trail. He knew how they operated. He had lived this life from the other side. He had been the tracker, the one quietly making inquiries at inns and alehouses, blacksmiths and feed stores, slipping into stables at night and checking the boxes, swapping stories with local whores. When necessary he had done more than track. Stay alive in the Phage long enough and sooner or later you’d find blood on your hands.

  They dressed it up, of course, wrapped themselves in cloth-of-gold. They were the Brotherhood of the Long Watch and they pushed back against the darkness, taking the long view, identifying threats, consolidating strengths, moving in ways subtle and unsubtle to remake and prepare the world.

  The question was, who watched the Phage?

  Angus wished them harm, every one of them. And they wished him that harm right back.

  He was careful as he made his way north through the Crater. It was God’s Day and the streets were quiet. In Morning Star any copper coins exposed to daylight today were God’s due. It meant business went inside and candles and lamps were lit early so that coins could be exchanged in man’s light, not daylight, and God could be denied his piece. The barter market was open by the river but Angus avoided that particular noisy busyness and instead took a route that followed the city’s west wall.

  Chapel houses were open and the low and monotonous bellow of horns urged people to come and pray. It was still early and the light was golden as it cut along the streets. Apart from a brief excursion for food Angus had not left the lodging house in three days and he experienced the morning and the city as separate from him. Waiting was not a thing he did well, but in this he had little choice. All normal avenues were closed in this city. People he would typically use for information could not be trusted. The Phage was one conversation away from them all.

  His best chance of finding the Maiden was through her hands. This was her city and she had lived, secreted within it, for many years. Angus could only imagine what duplicities she practiced to keep herself hidden in plain sight. She was the Crouching Maiden and that was what she was known for: staying still, keeping low, letting the shadows gather around her mutable female form. Describing her to strangers was impossible: no two people looking straight at her saw the same thing. That was why the hands were so important. She could not work her magic on the imperfect substance of burned flesh.

  And she was hurting. Somewhere the Maiden was hurting and in pain and somewhere a doctor was treating her. Her hands were the tools of her trade and she would not entrust them to some backstreet drunken healer. Mobility could not be lost. Lose her grip on a knife and she was dead. She would have no choice but to seek out a fine su
rgeon, and Angus’ instincts told him she would do so in Morning Star. This was a city with hundreds of doctors to choose from. This was her home.

  Even on God’s Day, Spice Gate broadcast its location for all to detect and Angus turned east, away from the wall, when he smelled the odors of pepper and garlic. His intention was to approach the surgeon’s street from a different direction than his last visit. Caution ruled the game this morning. He could not dismiss the possibility that the woman in the moneylender’s had passed along word of his arrival to the Phage. Nor could he dismiss the fact that by simply inquiring about a woman with burned hands, the surgeon’s apprentice had drawn the attention of Magdalena Crouch herself. Burned or unburned the Maiden was the most dangerous assassin in the North.

  Angus Lok moved through the city’s northwestern corner like a specter, gray-coated, toeing the shadows, avoiding open spaces. He scribed a quarter-league circle around the surgeon’s house and moved no closer until he had circumvented it. A six-story building with a dovecote open to the sky was the tallest structure in the area and he looked at it closely, but kept walking. He rejected the second tallest structure—a tower manse with a roof of domed copper—and settled on the third tallest, a four-storied timbered house with windows looking across to the surgeon’s building and street. Angus entered the building’s back courtyard and tried the door.

  It opened into a kitchen. A pretty maid with blond hair barely contained by a white cap turned to face him. “They all out?” he asked, not giving her time to think.

  “They’re at chapel, yes.”

  “I’d better wait then.”

  The girl looked uncertain. Her slender fingers danced across the surface of her apron.

  “Very well, I’ll go,” Angus told her, “but you’ll have to tell the master that I’m not sure when I can return.” He turned, put his hand on the door.